3 Ways Your Brand Can Respond To Facebook’s New Changes

23 Jan 2018 by picklemarketing

Earlier this week, Mark Zuckerberg announced a change in the type of content you will be seeing in your news feed. Effective immediately. The change will significantly reduce the amount of business updates displayed, in favour of posts, videos and photos that are shared or commented on by your friends. The change comes in response to users, who feel the platform had become crowded with publisher and branded posts and shifted away from its intended purpose as a destination to connect with family and friends. But regardless of this, there is no denying that Facebook is a powerful marketing tool for businesses – and it still can be. All it means is a change in approach.

Find Your Advocates

One of the most important things for you to do now is find your brand advocates. Every brand has advocates out there, if you look hard enough. They could be your customers, your strategic partners, your staff or even your own family. Whoever your advocates are, you need to ask them to start really getting involved with your Facebook page. The people who believe in what you do and support it will be critical, because it’s their sharing, commenting and liking that will get your message out there now. This also means you need to start actively engaging with the people who interact with your content – encourage discussion and debate, hold polls and create genuinely useful content. Without it, your posts simply won’t be seen.

Be Authentic

Since the rise of ‘fake news’ and the increasing plague of ‘clickbait’, business owners will have another fine line to tread. Facebook will be working to ‘demote’ any business posts that go against another of its key newsfeed values – and that’s authenticity. Facebook algorithms will be looking for business content that is spammy, sensationalistic or misleading, and featuring it far below posts that are classified as ‘meaningful interactions’, genuine and authentic. So if you want your posts to be seen by as many people as possible, it’s time to be genuine online. If you’re sharing articles, avoid clickbait style titles, ensure the content is actually relevant and above all, make it something people will genuinely care about to see the best performance.

Try Live Video

If you’ve not given it a go before, now is definitely the time to give Facebook live video a try. It’s still new to a lot of people, but already business owners using live video have noticed that they get around 6 times more interactions on videos as they do on other content – including standard video. This is because they tend to promote discussion, have more of an instant interactivity to them and make the brand feel more accessible. Given how successful it could be, it’s silly not to try it. It’s an organic way to grow your reach, it’s free, and it has a proven record of being much more engaging than any other kind of content. And research shows that despite its success, it’s publishers who are ahead with live videos, while brands are lagging behind.

All in all, the changes aren’t all bad. While there has been an outcry form businesses who have been using Facebook to promote their brands, we believe the changes are actually a positive thing. They will encourage brands to really think about what matters to their customers, and drive the creation of genuine, meaningful content in a world that is fast filling up with meaningless clickbait and oversaturated ‘me too’ articles. And yes, you might have to spend a little more on Facebook to get your message across – but it’s still a hugely successful marketing tool, so if it needs a little more love, who are we to say no? For more information on how to use Facebook effectively in 2018, just get in touch with the Pickle team today.